Judges 16:31Then Samson's brothers and his father's family came down, carried him back, and buried him between Zorah and Eshtaol in the tomb of his father Manoah. And he had judged Israel twenty years.

Judges 17:2said to his mother, "The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from you and about which I heard you utter a curse--I have the silver here with me; I took it." Then his mother said, "Blessed be my son by the LORD!"

Judges 18:2So the Danites sent out five men from their clans, valiant warriors from Zorah and Eshtaol, to spy out the land and explore it. "Go and explore the land," they told them. The men entered the hill country of Ephraim and came to the house of Micah, where they spent the night.

Treasury of Scripture

And there was a man of mount Ephraim, whose name was Micah.

A.

Judges 17:6 In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

Judges 10:1 And after Abimelech there arose to defend Israel Tola the son of Puah, the son of Dodo, a man of Issachar; and he dwelt in Shamir in mount Ephraim.

Joshua 15:9 And the border was drawn from the top of the hill unto the fountain of the water of Nephtoah, and went out to the cities of mount Ephron; and the border was drawn to Baalah, which is Kirjathjearim:

(1) There was.--The Vulg. has, "there was at that time" which is an error, for these events happened before the days of Samson.

A man of mount Ephraim.--The hill-district of Ephraim, as in Judges 2:9. The Talmud (Sanhedr. 103, b) says that he lived at Garab, not far from Shiloh, but the name ("a blotch") is probably a term of scorn (Deuteronomy 28:27). Similarly, we find in Perachim, 117, a, that he lived at Bochi. (See Judges 2:1-5.) Most of the idolatrous violations of the second commandment occurred in the northern kingdom (Gideon, Judges 8:27; Micah, Judges 17; Jeroboam, 1 Kings 12, 13). These apostasies were not a worship of other gods, but a worship of the true God under unauthorised conditions, and with forbidden images.

Whose name was Micah.--Scripture does not deem it necessary to say anything more about him. His very name--here Micayeh-, "Who is like Jehovah "--seems to show that he had been trained by pious parents. The contraction Micah is adopted throughout the rest of the story.

Verse 1. - We here light upon quite a different kind of history from that which has preceded. We no longer have to do with judges and their mighty deeds in delivering Israel from his oppressors, but with two detached histories, which fill up the rest of the book, relating to the internal affairs of Israel. There is no note of time, except that they happened before the time of Saul the king (Judges 17:6; Judges 18:1), and. that Phinehas the son of Eleazar was alive at the time of the occurrence of the second (Judges 20:28). Both, no doubt, are long prior to Samson. The only apparent connection of the history of Micah with that of Samson is that both relate to the tribe of Dan, and it may be presumed were contained in the annals of that tribe. Compare the opening of the Books of Samuel (1 Samuel 1:1). Mount Ephraim; i.e. the hill country of Ephraim, as in Judges 3:27; Judges 7:24, etc.